I'm impressed that Alexie went to such great lengths to try to assemble a collection that reflects diverse parts of the poetry world (race/gender etc. but also internet vs. print). I think the editor is in a tough place here but retroactively rejecting the piece seems like it would be stooping to the level of the poet. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that pseudonyms are generally acceptable, although I agree with others that this was certainly a misuse.

Like most every poet, I have viewed the publication of each year's Best American Poetry with happiness (I love that poem), jealousy (That poet has been chosen for seventy-three years straight.), disdain (Oh, look, another middling poem from one of the greats.) and hope (Maybe they'll cho...

My colleague at Drexel, Lisa McElroy, has a pretty powerful piece up at Slate today entitled Worrying Enormously About Small Things. In it, she describes her long-term battle with a severe anxiety disorder - from her sophomore year in college through her receipt of tenure last month. Despite t...

There are interesting contrasts between the traditions among Anglo-Americans in the U.S. and tribal traditions in the U.S., in many of which farming was traditionally a female activity, much to the chagrin of early missionaries and settlers. For a modern example, see Riggs v: Estate of Attakai, No. SC-CV-39-04 (Navajo 2007).

As I'm thinking about Carla Spivack's conference on "trusts and estates meets gender, race, and class" -- and also testamentary practices in the Shenandoah Valley in the pre-Civil War era -- I see Hannah Alsgaard's "Rural Inheritance: Gender Disparities in Farm Transmission." (Thanks to Gerry...

Matt, I was speaking completely off the cuff there, and I could well be wrong. The Donation of Constantine seems different to me because it appears to have been created for a strategic purpose and so was not a hoax for it's own sake (though who knows--that could be true of the book as well). I was thinking that people hundreds of years ago probably had less time for such foolishness and also that part of the power (and lure) of hoaxes today lies in the ability to spread them through mass communication, which is tied to the invention of printing press. But my assumption about lack of time probably was not true of the rich anyway, so perhaps it was a hoax. It would be much more exciting if it was written in an unknown language or was encrypted though.

The BBC has an fascinating story today about the Voynich Book, a book dating from the early 1400s written in an unknown language. Since no one has yet been able to decipher the language in which the book is written, controversy has been raging for years about whether the book is a hoax or was w...

The O'Reilly Theater at Keble College, Oxford recently played host to a new show: John Rawls's A Theory of Justice: The Musical! It was billed as "an all-singing, all-dancing romp through 2,500 years of political philosophy." Here's a trailer from the show: A Theory of Justice: The Musical - ...